The Left-Handed Story

Friday

Mar 13, 2009 at 2:00 AM

The Left-Handed Story

Writing and the Writer’s Life By Nancy Willard The University of Michigan Press 143 pgs., $18.95
Michael Lee

There are many writers out there looking for that magic pill that will transform spectacular ideas into sparkling best sellers. That’s the problem with these great ideas we’re always hatching in the shower or in traffic jams or at the conclusion of a night of Margaritas. But when we try to capture those flashes of brilliance on paper, the Phantom of Cliché descends upon the material and we wind up staring in dismay at the page. What happened? And that’s when we start scurrying for the magic pill in the form of writing books.

Welcome to the newest pill, Nancy Willard’s The Left-Handed Story: Writing and the Writer’s Life. If you’re looking for a nuts and bolts manual on fiction, you’d be better off with Janet Burroway’s classic, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. That’s if you want to shell out about seventy bucks, because it is a college textbook. Or you could go with the cheaper and more entertaining Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott or Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. All have become classic writer’s help books that have legions of devotees. This is not to minimize Nancy Willard’s excellent effort in her new book. The Left-Handed Story is wonderfully written and full of sage advice. It’s also as lyrical a book on writing as you’re likely to find. The problem, for me, is that the title is somewhat misleading. I expected less memoir and muse-speak than I did concrete ideas on writing process. Perhaps a little less about dreams and more on dramatic effect, although to be fair, a good helping of poetic advice found in this book might have contributed to its rhapsodic ambience. Here’s an example of where I’m going with this. In discussing writing a love story, Willard cites 18th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s advice for writing a love letter as also being useful for writing a story: “You ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.” Hah? Really? Yet there is much to be admired here as well. Willard’s handling of the dreaded writer’s block (which Norman Mailer once defined as “a failure of the ego”) is extremely helpful. She invokes Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka, Thomas Edison, and Saul Bellow to drive home her salient point: “What the writer awaits, of course, is inspiration. And immersing yourself in your work is still one of the best ways to find it.” I think most writers would give that a big AMEN, as tough a reality as it might be. Toward the end of the book there is also a lengthy interview with Harry Roseman, an assistant to Joseph Cornell who was an avant garde filmmaker, sculptor and a founder of artistic assemblance. It’s an interesting conversation between the author and Roseman, but does it shed the light on “writing and the writer’s life” that, say, an interview with Anne Tyler or Annie Proulx might? I can sense Willard wincing at this, thinking, hey that’s not the book I wanted to write. And yet, I can’t help but think it’s more the book we expect by the title. Ultimately, Willard’s book deserves shelf space in any writer’s collection. Perhaps it is the scope of this work – considering both fiction and poetry – that makes it feel cramped within its 143 pages. Still, she’s written a book on writing you won’t come across again soon. It is iconic and idiosyncratic and by its nature perhaps must suffer greater expectations than its slender offering can possibly achieve.